Album Notes

GO HOUSE? One summer night in 1989 Chris Pati, Nick DiMauro and I went to some local dance club in downtown Huntington hoping to catch a snippet of a 12” single we had edited a few months earlier. We had just finished a long and tedious engineering session trying to make someone’s cruddy recording sound a little less cruddier and we were depressed because our biggest pair of monitor speakers (the ones used to check out how much bass is on a recording) still didn’t come back from repair land and the studio biz was slow. We were sure about our talents but no one in the music world seemed to care, so our attitude was how shall I say...Shitty? At the time, our own homespun label, BACK DOOR RECORDS had released Marci Geller’s 12 inch single “Shake You Up”. We were learning about the pains of retail tracking and had spent that winter working with a DJ by the name of Stu Best. Stu was kind of a "guido" character that showed us how to create extended dance re-mixes from Marci’s original “Shake You Up”. This is a customary procedure done to most pop dance records if ya don’t already know. He also stressed how important it was for him to have a piece of toast before every meal. Go figure. Anyway, the single had gone through all the expected pay off channels in order to get some airplay and sales. Marci did the dance club circuit but basically we found ourselves being ripped off by promoters and broke. The president of the record company, Joe Remson soon suggested begrudgingly, that we put out another single. But what to put out? We didn’t know. Angry and frustrated, here we were at this club confronted with a herd of white Long Island disco heads, grinding away at the obnoxious pounding of a four on the floor kick drum that could easily have been used as a weapon during the gulf war. Amidst all the typical dance music however, was a new sounding groove that while still being obnoxious to me, was rather bizarre in harmony and form. Some of it I actually liked. Nick and Chris instantly dug it and they told me it was called house music. I believe the piece I’m referring to was called “This Is Acid” by Maurice Starr. After we had our share of abuse from this disco fluid exchange we left in an aggressively snotty mood, screaming out all sorts of existential profanities at no one in particular. Someone started to say the word “HOUSE” in a rather bizarre voice and the three of us all agreed that this new dance stuff was a piece of cake to write. (Not necessarily true we would find out later). It was Chris who eventually screamed out “GO FUCK YOURSELF”. For commercial reasons we quickly modified that into GO HOUSE YOURSELF. In an instant, the clichéd light bulb lit up. “Hey, what a ridiculous idea for a house piece.” “Lets make tons of money.” “We’ll show those fuckers!” Half-heartedly we made our way into a diner laughing, choking, ordering toast, now feeling some what energized. This was the perfect way to get rid of our music business frustrations; brutally make fun of a popular trend and record it without giving a flyin’ rat’s ass what anyone thinks. Yeah...EAT ME! And so, on the back of a paper place mat Nick channeled the GOD OF ABSURDITY and quickly scribbled down the lyrics about “vinyl shoes” and “back door hoagies”. Aww yeah for ya... Warp factor 6, and we were back at the studio messing around with some beats and basic keyboard parts. Nick and Chris (in my opinion always in competition) came up with most of the groove with me just adding those strange (not so strange anymore) John Tabacco harmonic ideas that could easily upset an A&R clone in the commercial music world. After laying down the rap, which Nick may have only done once, we put in some wacky Emax samples I had slated for a future tune. One such sample was the infamous chain saw, introduced in a typical Dan Robinson type voice (a talented songwriter Nick and I worked with years earlier). (This chain saw idea showed up in some rock group's video 2 years later.) The other sample (just before that magnificent minor nine guitar chord) was a slice from an unfinished Chris Pati song called “I’ll Be Waiting”. The results were just as we suspected. Hip but contemporary. Maybe it sucked. We didn’t know. We had no way of measuring the amount of bass. We didn’t care. It was fun. There was toast everywhere...sort of. GO HOUSE YOURSELF was mixed and ready to be pressed. We took a quick cold nap in the studio. Later that afternoon, we played it for Meryl Mathews, Scotto Savitt and Joe Remson. It got the big thumbs up. This was the next Back Door single. Now it’s time! We’ll take over the dance industry! Sure. Ok, but first we needed a name. We tossed around the most obvious ones: Martin Luther Seizure, White Pope Pooper, King J----- Turd, not quite right... Too commercial! Eventually, we settled on the less racist Souled Out. With no lawyers at all, all three of us signed each others contract to Back Door Records, had some chicken and broccoli (glass on the side) and created a few new club re-mixes from the original house mix. First we did the Popular Radio Mix which actually gave us a bit of a problem because the last edit didn’t sound smooth. Maybe a voice held over or the sound pressure dropped. Anyway, I suggested to Nick that we put in an outrageous explosion to cover up the problem. It worked. It was a nice surprise for folks at the record pressing plant (their needle on the disc cutter jumped five feet off the lathe) but screw it. It sounded exciting. Taking our aggression out even further on the music industry we created the Out House mix. This little morsel was an insult to those who love to dance. It had no fixed time. Perfect for white folk. Chris messed with the pitch wheel on the 24 track machine while NIck and I randomly pulled the faders up and down. It was mixed in one take. Suddenly, Joe Remson’s nephew quickly designed a cover for the single and I helped with the layout and back sleeve. If you look closely on the back (If you can still find this 12”) you can see a small Modern Voices logo (a symbol for a holographic group idea Chris had) with all of our initials carved on it. Since our names never appeared on the record I figured I’d put in some clues. Nobody cared. So here it was. A record that was completed in 7 hours with totally absurd words, fidelity that we cringed at and had always stayed away from, a title that made fun of the industry we all wanted to be a big part of, no author or personnel listed, a chain saw solo, and to top it off, the rapper was a white guy from Stony Brook, Long Island. So much for following the rules, right? Guess what? It was the biggest selling 12” record forever! Well, not really. But it was a respectable success for an unknown indie label. By November of 1989 the record went to #36 on Billboards retail dance chart. We were offered a small deal with SBK Records, (stupidly turned it down). We had an over seas deal with Bellephon in Europe, did an interview with a San Francisco radio station during the big 1989 San Franscisco earthquake and ultimately sold quite a few 12” records, of which we received little or no money. I think they bootlegged them in Europe. Hell, it went to #9 in Italy! Oh and yes: Nick, Chris, Nick’s brother Gian, myself and my sister Laura went out one day and shot footage for a video. The total shooting cost was $12.00. That was just for the vhs tape. By a stroke of luck one of Chris’ friends (John Molloy) gave us $20,000 worth of editing time in a big facility in NYC for free. That definitely made the video look half way decent. Though it was rejected by MTV, (probably a skin color issue) it went to #1 in Puerto Rico, (See, they should definitely turn that place into the 51st state.) and played on some syndicated music show that went out to various 1 star hotels across the USA. Again, we saw no cash in our pockets. On a positive note: I remember going to the biggest club in Manhattan called the Palladium. Marci Geller was promoting Shake You Up there and at one point the DJ put on Go House Yourself. At first I didn’t recognize the tune, then it kick in. That annoying kick drum sounded freakin’ awesome! People were grooving to it! Dear Christ on a stick! We made it! What a rush! Isn’t house music the best? Of course we had to have a follow up, so we created Pump House. The title at least, was a goof on the Technotronics hit “Pump Up The Jam”. (Note: A few big dance / house groups sprung up about this time. One such group was C & C Music Factory. In their later efforts, they mysteriously refer to their new production company as “Souled Out”. Coincidence? Rumor has it, they heard one of our productions for Jackie Siebert and stole the name. Too bad we weren’t incorporated. ) But I digress...Pump House was far more sophisticated than Go House Yourself and in my opinion a lot more pop. It had a catchy hook with “oooh, oooh, ooohs” in it, (check out the song People of The 90s by Fuzzy Gray Logic for possible continuity) and some inventive soloing and sampling. Though it has many great musical moments I feel we never came close to the sneering contempt and spontaneity that went into Go House Yourself. Fortunately, out of nowhere, some one let us test out a digital editing devise and we went nuts cutting up this eclectic dance extravaganza. Unfortunately, the fidelity of this machine wasn’t so hot and that in itself gave Pump House a bad taste in our mouths. I later re-mastered it for a little more contemporary sound and edited all the different takes we did to create a non-stop dance extravaganza. It works! Nick tried to do a few club dates (a party for Woman’s Home Journal of all things) but the scene wasn’t happening. Simultaneously, we had to literally go house ourselves because Bob Minetta, the owner of Backdoor Studios and the house in which it was in, was moving to Virginia. By the time Chris bargained with Bob and we transported all the equipment to a new location in Centerport and rebuilt the studio, our label started to have financial problems (snort, snort, snort). Nasty ego type things also started to developed. Souled Out and Back Door Records became history. Good Bye! NEXT! All three of us tried to work together on more dance stuff (Jackie Siebert was the last artist), but it just wasn’t the same. The magic was gonzo. Nick and I (and later with his brother Gian ) delved into the more alien side of house music while Chris worked with various local dance artists. Eventually money, the Centerport studio and friendships split off but, and I say this with all due respect, at least we all learned how many beats of hi hat one should have during the break down section in a club re-mix. Good old Stu Best... Miss ya babe. “Ah, waitress... bring me a pair of toast”. - John Tabacco 2007